How viable is apartment living for production?

[sjm]

Beck found having neighbours inspirational:

[dgmulf]

^ LOL. That's looking at the glass half-full.

The perfect the enemy of the good.

Ain't that the truth!

[Hink]

Some will say you can do everything with headphones but I have found that difficult as headphones give a somewhat different perspective to the sound field. Basically instead of having a horizontal triangular sound field (you being one vertex and each monitor being another in front of you) you kind of have a linear sound field with you right in the middle between the headphones. This doesn't seem to bother everyone but I find it hinders depth perception which in turn hinders placement within the sound field. Still much can be done with headphones, especially recording.

I get why people say this. I think with certain massive lows a tuned room may be preferable.

I find most of that illusory, myself. Depth of field is necessarily more accurately perceivable because it's through speakers... in what ideally has cut majorly down on reflections?

This is an abiding interest of mine in mixing, back to front in a mix, and I only use headphones. I like to have different bass response and I do not want illusory presence or highs, but your nearly entirely flat response only goes so far, too. Everyone will have their own thing, but that's my view on it, from never expecting to have enough space to do otherwise. The perfect the enemy of the good.

I hear yah Jan, I went decades in an apartment and 99% of the time using headphones and there is no way I would let that stop me. But now with such a huge difference there is that feeling of 'better' though I dont really care to use that term.

I'm not going to say my room is well tuned but I'm working on it, the best part is that my studio is off of my living room so it's expanded as I describe in the link below. Having a quais live room is really cool because I still dont blow the windows out but I can get to the perfect volume to get great feedback and the extra space to move around is a plus. I still mix at lower volumes, I still use headphones a lot, but I no longer worry about picking up noise

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7760&p=6806796#p6806796

[sjm]

^ LOL. That's looking at the glass half-full.

You have to admit he got some great samples out of it though...

[annode]

I'm going to be moving soon, along with my home studio setup, and I'm not sure if I should consider renting an apartment, or focus exclusively on finding an isolated unit like a guest house. I mix at fairly quiet volumes, but I'm also a vocalist. Things I'm worried about include pissing my neighbors off with my passionate vocals, and my neighbors distracting me or ruining my recordings through the walls. How much of an issue is this?

Well if it's only the vocalizing your worried about, that can be done anywhere with relative ease. Got a laptop, your almost there.
EDIT- also, you can look to rent a house, that's what I'm doing. My place shares one relatively soundproof wall with the neighbor. The other wall is a breezeway(open air separation between 'row' homes). Lucky for me this home extends out beyond the shared wall neighbor. This is an add-on section of the house. I use this room for recording. It doesn't share a wall and I can f**k-off anytime I want.

BTW, David Gray recorded his 1st smash album 'White Ladder" in his London apartment.